A Christian guide to trolling without sinning



Donald Trump did not invent political trolling, but he may be its most gifted modern practitioner. His opponents still do not understand the tactic, which is why he runs circles around them. To understand trolling, we must see the larger ideological conflict of our time.

For Christians, trolling poses a serious moral question. It can seem cruel: a digital version of poking someone until he explodes, then laughing at the explosion. It also often involves deception. Does that violate the Ninth Commandment? How can deliberate provocation be reconciled with Christ’s command to “love your neighbor”?

When the guardians of tolerance demand that dissenters be silenced, love may even require a well-placed troll.

The answer begins by defining the term carefully.

The internet term “trolling” appears to draw on fishing, not the monster under the bridge. A fisherman drags bait through the water and waits for a fish to bite. A political troll places rhetorical bait before an opponent and waits for an angry, thoughtless response. The Oxford English Dictionary defines trolling as “posting antagonistic or disingenuous messages to provoke a hostile or annoyed response” and more broadly as behavior “intended to provoke or deceive.”

Political trolling is public mockery meant to elicit a response that exposes a contradiction, wastes an opponent’s time, and strips an ideology of undeserved authority. Legitimate trolling therefore presupposes that some public figures and ideologies deserve public mockery.

An effective troll identifies a contradiction in a public figure or ideology, frames it provocatively, and waits. The target becomes flustered and responds thoughtlessly, confirming the original criticism. Rather than merely accusing an opponent of hypocrisy, the troll induces him to demonstrate it before an audience.

This is not the same as insulting strangers for entertainment. Nor is trolling a license to lie, defame, threaten, or mock private suffering. It is more like misdirection in war or sports, used to confuse an opponent and reveal his weaknesses. No one accuses a quarterback of lying when he fakes a handoff, and no one expects a general to warn the enemy about a surprise attack.

Sun Tzu taught that warfare depends on knowing both your enemy and yourself. Schopenhauer cataloged the rhetorical tricks people use to appear right. The troll draws on both insights, arranging the contest so the opponent reveals his weaknesses to the public and loses respect.

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Christians recognize the distinction between just and unjust wars. Not every use of force is murder, and refusing to defend the innocent is not an act of love.

Rhetorical warfare is also real. Words can deceive, intimidate, indoctrinate, and destroy reputations. Institutions use language to disguise coercion as compassion and discrimination as inclusion.

Not every Christian is called to fight a kinetic war, and not every Christian is called to fight a rhetorical one. Some lack the temperament, position, or skill for public confrontation. That is no disgrace. A soldier without discipline endangers his own side, and so does a would-be internet warrior with a social media account and three cups of coffee.

But Christians cannot pretend that no conflict exists. Christian and anti-Christian visions of God, humanity, sexuality, justice, freedom, and authority compete for control of our institutions. They cannot both prevail. The question is not whether society will be governed by a moral vision, but which moral vision will govern it.

The Bible does not condemn every use of ridicule. Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, suggesting that their god might be occupied or asleep. Jesus called the scribes and Pharisees “whitewashed tombs.” Public teachers promoting public falsehoods were exposed so their teaching and authority would lose the audience’s respect.

We can identify a pattern for legitimate trolling. Its proper target is a public figure advancing a destructive ideology. Its method is ridicule aimed at hypocrisy. Its immediate purpose is to provoke a revealing response. Its true audience is not the target but the people watching. The goal is to protect the vulnerable from harmful ideologies that lead souls to perdition.

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Publicly exposing the absurdities of ideologies such as critical theory or LGBTQ activism gives those who might be led astray an opportunity to reconsider. Stripping an ideology of its unearned authority can turn the audience toward truth and away from leaders and systems that lead to destruction.

I am not recommending that everyone take up trolling. But we should not treat an ideological war as less consequential than a sporting contest, where teams talk smack and use fake plays and misdirection to win.

When opponents of Christianity seek to censor biblical teaching and replace it with Marxist dialectics and LGBTQ sexual ethics, exposing their public leaders to laughter and ridicule is part of the conflict. Their panicked responses can display their folly. The purpose is to protect the vulnerable and persuade those who recognize the emptiness of the anti-Christian position.

Love of neighbor does not require helping a hypocrite preserve his disguise. Sometimes love requires argument, and argument requires confrontation. Trolling can protect your neighbor from wolves in sheep’s clothing. When the guardians of tolerance demand that dissenters be silenced, love may even require a well-placed troll — and the patience to let your opponent prove your point.

‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive



Some still remember when Google defined itself by a simple motto: “Don’t be evil.” When Google reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, the new parent company adopted the somehow less confidence-inspiring, “Do the right thing.” Another phrase with a lower bar also made the rounds — “to organize the world’s information” — but rest assured, that was never the motto. It was simply ... uh ... the mission statement.

Anyway ...

The AI doomers’ strange brand of apocalypticism is: Let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it.

It took until this week for some of the most powerful voices in tech policy to circle back explicitly to a prime directive: Avoid hellacious acts. For that, thank the AI doomers, whose strange brand of apocalypticism — let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it — finally breached technology insider-dom and splashed across the political timeline.

The high-stakes soap opera has, as usual, deeper currents than the news feed can convey. But the key development is that the White House and its allies moved at warp speed to establish a few basic touchstones that take us back to the good old days of not being evil.

Trump has received most of the attention for memeing his stern-looking self above the caption “Americanism, Not Effective Altruism!” But his vice president captured the matter in a single line that’s tough to beat. “If you’re building Frankenstein,” he said, “stop!"

Note the emphasis. Trying to build an evil god — for instance, one with a statistically nonzero chance of wiping out the human race — is fortunately still considered axiomatically evil. But JD Vance’s reference underscores that trying to build a "new man," even with the best of intentions, is also evil.

According to the doomers, the best way to save the world from evils they might create is for the rest of us to give them some form of planetary governing control. Vance endorsed a more commonsense approach: The best way to spare the world from evils you’re responsible for is to ... not do them in the first place.

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The vice president may, like every one of his predecessors in living memory, carry a pronounced partisan identity. But his folksy-clever line echoes in anti-doomer rhetoric now blaring from the industry’s rooftops. Microsoft, of all places, recently published its own rulebook for what not to build. On X, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman promoted the new “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which insists AI “is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness. It should,” Microsoft avows, “be engineered to avoid representing as though it has feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation.”

Microsoft also flatly states: “We reject the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.” No Frankensteins here!

Or rather, no Frankenstein’s monsters — which means no Dr. Frankensteins running amok in the lab.

At Palantir, outspoken CTO Shyam Sankar made a similar point in a 2025 interview. “I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI,” Sankar said.

“The people who have religion are the most skeptical” of the doomers’ build-a-god-and-save-the-world-from-it thesis — which, yes, does itself resemble an inverted religion. For “the people who are kind of transhumanists,” Sankar concluded, “it becomes what they wish were true.”

Even Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, not known for Bible-thumping, recently struck an economic note with more than a whiff of spirituality.

“If we’re not confident about the safety of the products, like all companies ... if you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it,” he said. "And so that’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”

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Translation: Hear a little voice in your head, or more likely, your heart? Whispering, “No, this product is bad”? Don’t take it to market.

Turns out, you can just not do things!

Of course, Huang’s logic is a bit deceptive. We would like to believe the market will punish bad people for taking bad things to market, but that is not always how it works. As we speak, present-day Dr. Frankensteins are transplanting human brain organoids into mice engineered to lack most of their cerebral cortex, allowing the human tissue to occupy much of the vacant space and wire into the animals’ nervous systems.

No, doctors! Bad! Evil! Don’t!

Except they are. In the end, it matters that people examine their own hearts for evil before looking elsewhere and pointing fingers. But spiritual insistence alone will not keep society on the rails. It is not enough to scowl at our mad doctors, however good their intentions, as their creations erode the boundaries around our sacred human bodies and being — supercomputers or no.

Glenn Beck: There's a reason they don't want you thinking as an individual



The left is determined to divide people into competing groups of oppressors and oppressed — and Christian apologist Frank Turek knows why.

“Marxism is all about the group, whereas Christianity is all about the individual. … That's the focus of the war on reality right now,” Turek tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck.

“They want people to identify everybody by an identity group,” he explains. “‘What identity group are you in?’ And if you are part of that collective, you’re oppressed. And if you’re not, you’re automatically an oppressor.”

“We’re not judging people individually any more,” he says. “We’re judging people by what? Even non-behavioral identity groups that they’re in. ‘Oh, you’re white, Glenn. You’re a bad guy. Oh, you’re a man. You’re a heterosexual. You’re a citizen of the U.S. You’re a Christian, Glenn. You’re an oppressor.’”


“But if you have the opposite qualities, you’re automatically oppressed,” he adds.

“It’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Glenn agrees. “You must destroy that God because that’s the personal God. That’s the first personal, and the only personal, God — the one true God.”

“And so all of this — this is why people hate Jews and why they’re trying to get Christians to say, ‘We don’t need to remember that Jesus was a Jew.’ Because if you can get ... yourself away from the Old Testament, now you don’t have the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob any more,” he continues. “And all of that falls apart.”

“You must have that. That’s why there’s this war. Everything boils down to that: the God of the individual,” he adds.

Turek agrees, noting that “it’s also why Marxism dispenses with the individual.”

“They think the state is eternal,” he says.

“Whereas we Christians know the state isn’t eternal,” he continues. “It’s individuals that are eternal, and they’re going to be judged individually.”

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Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image



Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, recently offered a reassuring vision of our technological future. Artificial intelligence, he predicted, will soon monitor police body cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboards. “Citizens will be on their best behavior,” he explained, “because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”

One is tempted to ask whether “best behavior” includes declining to construct an electronic surveillance state. Presumably, the algorithm will decide.

The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Ellison envisions AI supervising police officers as well as ordinary citizens. If an officer does something wrong, the system will detect the problem and report it to the appropriate authorities. Drones may even replace police cars during high-speed pursuits. The drone will follow the suspect while artificial intelligence records the proceedings and analyzes everyone involved.

Ellison, who is an atheist, wants an all-knowing being that is perfectly good and will judge our behavior.

It is difficult not to admire the efficiency. We have finally devised a deity suitable for the modern secular mind: omnipresent, nearly omniscient, and conveniently owned by a corporation, with promises of suitable oversight.

For generations, atheists and secularists have assured us that civilized people can dispense with belief in a God who sees our actions, judges our conduct, and holds us accountable. The notion of divine judgment was dismissed as primitive, oppressive, and psychologically unhealthy.

Enlightened people, we were told, do not need the threat of an all-seeing eye to behave morally.

Now, having removed God from heaven, our technological elites propose installing His replacement on every lamppost.

The secular project promised liberation from divine surveillance. Its culmination may be a camera that never blinks, connected to a machine that never sleeps, operated by authorities who never admit error.

Of course, artificial intelligence is not God. It is not even intelligent in the full human sense. It has no conscience, understands no moral law, and possesses no wisdom. It processes information according to purposes and standards supplied by human beings.

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This creates a slight difficulty: If AI is to report “bad behavior,” someone must first tell it what bad behavior is.

Who will do that?

The programmers? Oracle executives? Government agencies? More AI? The same institutions that cannot define a woman may soon be entrusted with defining acceptable behavior for every citizen.

AI can recognize a face, track a vehicle, and perhaps identify a raised voice. It cannot tell us why assault is wrong, why citizens possess rights, or why the government should be restrained in its treatment of them.

The atheist insists that the universe contains no transcendent moral order. Human beings are products of impersonal matter, motion, and chance. Yet he continues speaking of justice, dignity, equality, and human rights as if these were eternal truths rather than temporary preferences produced by an unusual arrangement of atoms.

Having denied a Lawgiver above the state, he inevitably looks to the state to serve as lawgiver.

The God of Scripture sees everything, but His omniscience is joined to perfect knowledge, righteousness, and justice. He knows not merely what we do but why we do it. He judges the heart as well as the outward act.

Most importantly, God is not accountable to a government contractor, a political party, or Oracle’s quarterly earnings report because God is the standard for what is good, righteous, and holy.

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AI surveillance offers omnipresence without wisdom, judgment without righteousness, and accountability without any objective account of the good. It cannot produce virtue. At most, it can produce outward conformity in people who know they are being watched.

A man who refrains from stealing because theft is wrong possesses a measure of virtue. A man who refrains because six cameras and a drone are recording him possesses a measure of caution. The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Nor does recording everything solve the oldest political problem: Who watches the watchers? AI will report citizens to “the appropriate person,” Ellison tells us. This formulation is meant to be comforting, though history offers few reasons to assume that the person receiving unlimited information about the population will remain permanently appropriate.

The atheist rejected God because he did not want an authority above man. He is now constructing an artificial authority beneath man — but controlled by a small number of particularly powerful men. That is simply a transfer of divine attributes to institutions conspicuously lacking divine character.

We were told that when God disappeared, mankind would come of age. Instead, mankind immediately began shopping for cameras.

The choice is not between accountability and freedom from accountability. Every society will hold its members answerable to some standard. The real question is whether that standard rests upon a moral law higher than rulers or upon whatever rules the rulers program into their machines.

A God who judges governments as well as citizens is a barrier to tyranny. An AI system operated by the government is an instrument of it.

Our secular technologists have discovered that a society cannot survive unless people believe their actions are seen and judged. They have merely concluded that God’s principal defect was that He could not be purchased from Oracle.

Want to get closer to God? Log off and look around



Dear America, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not OK.

Our boys are very, VERY angry. To the point they want to kill each other, hit women, and hurt their teachers.

Like a fat person at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we keep stuffing ourselves but are never nourished.

Our young women are depressed, lonely, and barren. Those who aren’t — well, many of them are still unhappy and mentally fragile, to the point they will take the lives of their own children. And other women will applaud it.

Women can also kill an unborn child up through birth.

Compulsive displays

Violence and murder seem to be acceptable under almost any circumstance. Again, to the accolades of other Americans.

We shamelessly display bouts of irrational and hyperemotional behavior and videotape it for the world to see. Once again, the masses applaud.

Nothing is managed or dealt with in private. The world must know of all our pain and innermost thoughts, because supposedly, sharing helps others with their pain and suffering.

It does not. It merely spreads pathologies until the pathologies become the norm.

Everybody thinks they have something important to say so everyone is talking — all the time.

It is noisy, and it is distracting. I think about how much better the world would be if we all just agreed to share a little less. To “tweet” or “chime in” a little less.

Simulation sickness

Lindsay Clancy and Karmelo Anthony may have broken from reality, with devastating consequences, but in some ways, we all have. We are living in a simulated world of thoughts and ideas with no contact with the created order.

We need to, once again, commune with the physical world. In Orthodoxy, we say that God “is everywhere present and fills all things.” Not all thoughts, for He certainly is not. Not in all tweets or photos. In all things. The less we interact and engage with those things, the less we are tethered to Him and His order, for it is “good” (Genesis 1:31).

We need to build beautiful things like furniture and clothing, grow abundant gardens, or tame wild animals. Or we need to simply touch grass, a tree, or dirt. Anything that has God at its source.

We need to make and kiss and care for babies. They are also “good.”

RELATED: Gratitude is not perspective. It is remembering mercy.

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Empty calories

Manufacturing useful goods is superior to yelling into the echo chamber. Cameron Schiller, founder of hard tech start-up Rangeview, had this to say about physical things:

If all you do is shuffle papers and change numbers in an excel sheet, what connection do you feel to your neighbor? What responsibility do you feel to your country? People that can feel the product of their labor have a different sense of pride.

Not only do we need to commune with the physical world, but we also need to exhibit restraint and discipline in its use. We have not been good stewards of our bodies, our land, or the many resources God has bestowed upon us.

We have squandered the most important things — family, friendships, community, health, and yes, God — for the fleeting pleasures of temporal desires. Desires that are insatiable by food, money, convenience, sex, or any other thing humans chase that leave us feeling empty.

Like a fat person at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we keep stuffing ourselves but are never nourished.

Hospital for the soul

Don’t get me wrong — I love the conveniences of this modern world. But they require judicious use and above all, gratitude, both of which seem to be in short supply these days.

We are so free and so liberated we are lost. Lost in a never-ending maze of sickness – physical, mental, and spiritual.

We need to admit we are weak. That we require help from God to recover our compass and find our true north once again. Truth is not subjective, and it is found in God and His creation.

The church is the hospital for the soul. Our souls need true healing. Healing that can only be found in the sacramental life that God calls us to every day. Not just in thoughts and prayers, but in communion with the real.

Until then, nothing gets well.

Glenn Beck: This viral family fight reveals what happens when politics becomes your identity



A viral TikTok showing a daughter berating her mother over her support for Donald Trump has struck a chord with Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck — but not because of the political disagreement itself.

Instead, Glenn sees something larger at play.

“You made a wrong decision,” the daughter yells in the video. “And if you apologize to me for taking away my rights and the rights of everybody who can relate to me on these videos, then we would be fine. I told you in that text when you apologize for what you’ve done to this whole country, what you’ve had a hand in doing — you had a hand in this.”

“You and your people did this to my country — to all of our countries,” she added.


“That is the problem. You think it’s your country and there’s my way or the highway,” her mother responded.

“Murder is wrong! Racism is wrong! You know, he was sued over seven times for not serving black people,” the daughter yelled. “What do you have to say? What do you have to say to that?”

The daughter then called her mother “racist” and “hateful.”

“If there’s not a man in the house, then she needs to say, ‘Get out of the house. ... You can have different opinions, but you are not going to speak to me that way in this house. Period,’” Glenn says.

“Show some respect. But we don’t do that any more. And the reason why is we’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve completely forgotten who we are. … We’ve lost our story as a nation; we’ve lost our story as a people,” he adds.

Glenn notes that this problem stems from people no longer knowing who they are.

“When you can actually be silent for 20 minutes and just be alone with your own thoughts, you’re comfortable with knowing who you are. But I don’t think most of us even know who we are any more or why we’re here or what life is really for,” he explains.

“We are beginning to think we’re all here for politics. We’re not here for politics, gang. We’re not. We’re not fighting politics. We are fighting the collective versus the individual,” he says. “And that is a God thing.”

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The ‘Godballers’ are coming for the rainbow



In the book of Genesis, the rainbow symbolizes God’s covenant never again to destroy all living creatures in a global flood.

Then came the 1970s, when artist Gilbert Baker created the rainbow flag that became an enduring symbol of gay rights and, eventually, the broader LGBTQ movement.

Athletes reach audiences traditional religious institutions often struggle to reach, particularly young men.

Now some Christian athletes are beginning to reclaim the symbol — and something larger along with it.

A recent episode of A.J. Rice’s “Dangerous Laughter” podcast featured sports journalist Steve Eubanks discussing his new book, “Godball: How Athletes Are Saving Christianity.” Eubanks’ central argument is that professional and college athletes are increasingly using their platforms to express Christian faith openly and that this may reflect a broader religious revival, particularly among young men.

Athletes pray publicly, talk about Jesus in interviews, and use social media to communicate directly with fans. They no longer depend entirely on sportswriters or television networks to interpret what they believe.

That matters because athletes who embrace fashionable political causes are often celebrated, while those who express traditional Christian beliefs can encounter a different response.

Chicago Bulls guard Jaden Ivey learned that lesson this year. The Bulls waived him for “conduct detrimental to the team” after he criticized the NBA’s embrace of Pride Month and described LGBTQ celebration as “unrighteous.”

Jonathan Isaac drew criticism in 2020 when, citing his Christian faith, he stood for the national anthem and declined to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt. Tim Tebow became one of the most polarizing athletes in America more than a decade ago, largely because of how conspicuously he displayed his Christianity.

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker faced enormous backlash after a 2024 commencement speech at Benedictine College defending traditional Catholic teaching on marriage, family, and gender roles.

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Yet Eubanks argues that the cultural resistance may actually strengthen the phenomenon. Athletes reach audiences traditional religious institutions often struggle to reach, particularly young men. Sports reward discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, perseverance, delayed gratification, and submission to something larger than oneself — virtues naturally compatible with Christian teaching.

The most literal example of Christians reclaiming the rainbow came earlier this summer in San Francisco.

During the Giants’ Pride Night, pitchers Landen Roupp, J.T. Brubaker, and Ryan Walker wrote Bible verses on their rainbow-themed caps. Roupp cited Genesis 9:12-16 — the passage describing God’s covenant with Noah and the rainbow as its sign. A fourth pitcher, Sam Hentges, declined to wear the Pride cap altogether. MLB issued formal warnings to the three players who altered their caps.

The episode contained an irony almost too perfect to invent. The rainbow began in Scripture as a sign of God’s covenant. Christian ballplayers invoked that meaning and found themselves in trouble for altering a rainbow symbol adopted by the modern gay-rights movement.

Commissioner Rob Manfred later acknowledged another wrinkle: Giants players had not been properly informed that wearing the Pride caps was optional.

Eubanks sees these episodes as part of something larger.

There is evidence for at least part of his thesis. Gallup reported this year that the share of young American men who say religion is “very important” in their lives rose from 28% in 2022-23 to 42% in 2024-25. Young men also reached roughly the same level of religious service attendance as young women.

Sports may be one conduit for that renewed interest.

Consider Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever. Cunningham has described herself as a “woman of God” and this summer publicly opposed transgender women competing in women’s sports, saying young girls “shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The comments brought predictable backlash, but Cunningham refused to retreat.

RELATED: MLB’s Pride police strike out against Christian players

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That willingness to speak plainly is central to what Rice and Eubanks describe.

Young athletes do not need to become theologians. They need only refuse the increasingly strange proposition that Christianity belongs safely in private while every other moral and political creed may be displayed at center court, midfield, or home plate.

This is where “Godball” becomes more interesting than another collection of inspirational sports stories.

Athletes occupy an unusual position in American culture. They embody physical excellence, discipline, competition, loyalty, and sacrifice. Millions of young people watch them, imitate them, and listen when they speak.

If even a fraction of those athletes begin speaking openly about Christ, marriage, family, sex, sacrifice, and moral order, they create a cultural influence far beyond the stadium.

And perhaps the rainbow is the perfect place to begin.

Christians never needed permission to remember what it meant first.

Let the Godballers become the new heretics — and reclaim the rainbow.